


Death and Taxes

by Jay Tryfanstone (tryfanstone)



Category: The Worst Journey in the World - Apsley Cherry-Garrard
Genre: F/M, Gen, Post-Canon, Yuletide 2020, Yuletide Madness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-24
Updated: 2020-12-24
Packaged: 2021-03-11 04:00:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,008
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28268760
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tryfanstone/pseuds/Jay%20Tryfanstone
Summary: "Wonderful moonlight these days. I don't know why but it makes me feel homesick. I feel I am so very far away. Today is Mother's birthday."Tryggve Gran, 7 May 1912
Comments: 6
Kudos: 3
Collections: Yuletide Madness 2020





	Death and Taxes

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lightcudder](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lightcudder/gifts).



**Death**

It will be Aspley Cherry-Garard, Cherry, who, steeling himself in the killing cold of that last camp on the polar ice, will go through his friend Bill Wilson's pockets and return his closest belongings to his widow. Cherry takes Wilson's last notes, his diary, his last letter to his wife Orianna, Ory. Wilson writes, don't be unhappy, "For all is for the best." He is firm in belief, trusting in divine purpose, confident in himself. "Without a love for God," he had said, "I cannot imagine either loving you or being loved by you."

Scott writes to Oates' mother, "His last thought was of you."

As he has done over and over again during the course of the expedition, Birdie Bowers writes to his mother Emily. "Your ever loving son to the end in this life and the next when we will meet and where God shall wipe away all tears from our eyes." Bowers, as always, is doing his best.

Scott instructs that his diaries should be given to his wife. Wife was crossed out: Scott had added the word widow. "The womenfolk are always brave," he says. He'd written much earlier to Lois Evans, Edgar Evans' wife, that he hoped, "Edgar would get a good billet on his return, which would make it unnecessary for him to leave her again." He had told her she must not be anxious or worried.

Evans, too, died.

It is Oates' sister Lilian who hears the news first. She sees the headlines on a newspaper placard - Gran recalls 'CAPTAIN SCOTT DEAD'. Oates' mother Caroline, staying in the family's London flat and not on their estate, had missed the cable. Mrs Oates muffles her house in black crepe, makes her library a memorial chapel, and plants an apple tree in every garden at Gestingthorpe. To the end of her life she will wear mourning and carry her son's epulate in her handbag.

Kathleen Scott is at sea. The ship's captain calls her into his cabin to tell her the news, his hands shaking. Kathleen writes, "I remember I said without the least truth 'oh well never mind I expected that - thanks very much - I'll go and think about it." She reads fiercely on deck, longing for the hills, but writes in the high romanticism of the period, "Let me maintain my high, adoring exhaltation, and not let the contamination of sorrow touch me..." To Scott, she had written "If there's anything you think worth doing at the cost of your life - do it."

Soon after the memorial service, Emily Bowers joined Ory Wilson and Kathleen Scott at Buckingham Palace, where the king presented them each with a medal and clasp commemorating the Antarctic expedition. Absent from the memorial service was Edgar Evan's wife Lois. Short of funds, she had already sold her husband's medal from his Antarctic first expedition.

Caroline Oates boycotted both.

**Taxes**

In Antarctica, Scott signs over his money to the expedition. "Dearest mummy, you must be very proud and happy," Kathleen wrote to Hannah Scott. Mrs Scott is dependent on her son's financial support. For her, this is ruinous. "And all I pray is that I make Peter into as fine a fellow as you have made Scott," Kathleen adds.

Kathleen is travelling. Hannah and Scott's sisters are at that moment looking after the young Peter Scott.

"Dearest mother," Scott had written, after thir first meeting. "Of course Kathleen loved you."

Kathleen had already postponed one meeting with her fiance's mother. "I'm already booked," she'd said to Mrs Scott. "I'll ask Mabel Beardsley if she can postpone."

Mabel Beardsley was Aubrey Beardsley's sister. Rumours of homosexuality and incest dragged at her coat-tails: this was of no concern to Kathleen, armoured in gleaming Pre-raphaelite virginity and convinced of her own exceptional qualities. It may have been to Scott's mother, but - "She _shall_ love me," Kathleen determined, regardless of missed meetings, disreputable acquaintances, and the carrying off of a sole remaining son who had also been his family's main financial support.

Mrs Scott's thoughts are not recorded.

"Of course one couldn't be poor," Kathleen writes blithely, once engaged, as Scott tallies living expenses in married quarters - 'House repairs & cleaning £20, Laundress £25...' he noted gloomily. "Con dear," Kathleen adds, considering promotion in the Navy, "- you must have the first ship in the fleet or what's the use of you?" She sends Scott a lawyer's letter with no comments, the standard request for a settlement on marriage. Scott says to her, "My will leaves what I've got to my mother- I can't change that can I? - I told you I hadn't a life insurance..."

There is a photograph of Robert Falcon Scott in a suit, looking the very image of a bank manager, right down to the weary eyes and ink-stained fingers. He loathed fundraising, hated glad-handing strangers, thought shilling for cash "beastly", but Con dear had already buckled down for years. He and his brother Archie had supported their mother, before Archie died suddenly, travelling. The oldest of his four sisters had left home for nursing college three weeks after their father's funeral, when it was clear that there was no money left, and the other three followed into careers for which they were poorly prepared and in which they were paid little and respected less. Ettie went to theatre school, while Grace and Rose turned to dressmaking: two of them were married when Scott sailed. "Give the chicks my love," he will write to Ettie.

Oates had avoided entanglement. Teddy Evans, Hilda's husband, pinned him down in rhyme on the voyage south:

_Who avoided female society_  
_I said Captain Oates_  
_Because I prefer goats..._

Oates himself said darkly, "The visitors and women are a great nuisance as we can't get really dirty." He'll come around to Hilda Evans, "I like Mrs Evans very much," and found Ory Wilson, "a very nice wife", but his mother's lasting legacy may have been the avoidance of all womenfolk. Despite considerable wealth, Caroline Oates kept a careful hand on the purse strings, so that Oates writes over and over again for monies to buy hunters, polo ponies, hounds, a yacht - when Oates had never sailed before. "It was alright," he remarked, "As my grandfather was an admiral."

His mother's restraint was remarkable. Scott's biographer David Crane describes her as "formidably unattractive," which suggests he too is looking at the sole published photograph of Caroline Oates, sternly corsetted in her hunting habit, riding crop across her knee, formidable indeed: attractive, a matter of opinion. She was an effective estate manager, confident in her own judgement, and liked, too, by her tenants.

Cherry's mother Evelyn did not have the same confidence. Left to mange the family estate, she frets over decisions and worries about doing the right thing. "I am so very glad to find you think we did right about the drains," she writes to Cherry. Like Scott, Cherry too had four sisters, and none of them capable of boiling an egg. Accidentally wealthy by the primogeniture of feudal law, Cherry has been waited on all his life. When Scott offers him a place on the expedition, it is Cherry who has to ask the horrified family cook how to prepare food on a primus stove. His sisters offered him knitted hats, and took embroidery classes to manafacture his sledging flag - his was the only one with a coat of arms. It hangs still in the rafters of Scott's hut at Cape Evans.

Few among the expedition members had such resources. After the news of the fate of the polar party became public, there was a nationwide fundraising effort which eventually, in consolidated funds, totals a remarkable £75,000. Kathleen Scott received £8500, and her son Peter £3500. £6000 went to Scott's mother, along with a grace and favour apartment at Hampton Court. All of them received modest pensions for life. Ory Wilson also received £8500, while £4500 went to Bower's mother.

Edgar Evans was a rating, not an officer. Lois Evans and her twins received £1250, and a pension of £48 a year. Evans' medal was found, and restored to her, with its new clasp. Lois does not record her feelings on the matter: her marriage had been short, and her twins were not Evans' only children.

To put that £48 a year in context, when Caroline Oates learned that her son had been elected a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, she paid £45 to secure him life membership. The Oates, like the Cherry-Garrards, were not poor. Neither were as rich as Teddy Evans - the other Evans. Scott's second in command was married to Hilda Beatrice Russell: her family were fabulously wealthy, and had offered Lieutenant Evans £25,000 towards his own Antarctic expedition. Evans had chosen to sail with Scott instead. His access to funds the expedition desperately needed meant that he held considerable power to determine staffing, and he used it. At Christchurch, that entitlement nearly derailed the entire expedition.

**The price**

"May it never be known how very nearly the Terra Nova came to not sailing at the last few hours." Birdie writes to his mother. He has said earlier, "Somehow I don't like Mrs Scott. Painful silence when she arrives is the only jarring note of the whole thing. She runs us all just now and what she says is done - through the owner."

Already Kathleen Scott had managed to get her brother Wilfrid Bruce enrolled on the expedition, dispite his lack of experience: Teddy Evans, for his part, had refused to sail with Scott's friend Nick Shelton, a navy man of higher rank. Scott had had to ask Shelton, who had developed the motor-sleds, to resign.

Kathleen had argued with Wilson, too. At Melbourne, Kathleen Scott will force Wilson to take a boat out into a rising sea, at night, to allow her and the other wives to rejoin the _Terra Nova_. "Bill was furious and protested that the other women were cold and hungry, but I knew my man would expect me..."

"I hope," Bill Wilson wrote afterwards, "It will never again fall to my lot to have more than one wife at a time to look after, at any rate in a motor launch, in a running sea at night time." Wilson's diary of his, Cherry's and Bowers' midwinter expedition to the Emperor Penguin colony - Cherry's worst journey - is so unemotionally recorded it might as well have been a walk in the park. These, from Wilson, are strong words. But he does not like Kathleen. "I gather he thinks women aren't much use," she says. As she suffered from violent seasickness, and he had played nursemaid from Cape Town to Melbourne, he may have had a point.

But Kathleen held similar views on both matters. At home in London, she had said to Scott that she and the Wilsons, "Disregarded each other's sense of humour but otherwise got on well." In her own diary, later, after New Zealand, she says of Wilson, "A prig. A private schoolboy with no humour," and describes Mrs Wilson as, "A drab female." And On shore, Kathleen Scott inevitably found herself overshadowed by the wealthy Hilda and her fascinating and fashionable younger sister Rita. Hilda, on home territory in New Zealand, organised outings and dances for the expedition crew, while Kathleen worked with her husband, as she must have done in London, directing parcels, sewing name-labels, writing letters, on board ship and in and out of expedition matters. She was not happy with the other wives. For the next expedition, she wrote, "Wives must be chosen more carefully than the men."

The quarrell came to a head at a ball in Christchurch. Oates' diaries are as laconic as his speech, but he remarks. "There was more blood and hair flying about the hotel than you would see in a chicago slaughterhouse in a month." Birdie Bowers does his best to be fair, "I don't know who to blame..." Cherry blamed Teddy Evans. He always felt that Evans had got his post under false pretences, donating far less money to the expedition that he promised, bad-mouthing Scott in private, and disagreeing with Scott's decisions. When in Christchurch the expeditin's petty officer Taff Evans was found drunk, he was ordered home, but, well-regarded by Scott, talked his way back on board. Teddy Evans was furious. He wanted the popular Taff Evans off the expedition, and said so. It was, "the straw that broke the came's back," he said, and incited other officers to join him in resigning if Taff Evans was reinstated. The quarrel spread, of course, to Hilda and Kathleen.

It took Bill Wilson to smooth the matter over between Scott and Teddy Evans, and between their wives, too. Bowers records that Ory Wilson, at the ball, quietly let the concerned officers know that all was well and that the "feminine point of view" had been prevented from jeapardising the expedition.

After that incident, Ory had little time for Kathleen Scott. Kathleen's diaries record the moment when the wives wave goodbye to the _Discovery_ , not knowing when - if - they would see their husbands again. "Mrs Wilson was plucky and good!" she writes, but then adds that Ory, "sat sphinx like on the shore," oblivious to Kathleen's attempts to organize a post-departure tea. They would seldom speak again. "What an absurd prig," Kathleen Scott wrote when years later they met, at the funeral of Cherry's cousin. It was at that cousin's cottage that Ory and Bill Wilson had hosted Scott, and first discussed Antarctica. It's Wilson who introduced Scott and Cherry.

Kathleen is not so sanguine about Caroline Oates. They meet once, while Kathleen and Teddy Evans are in the process of editing Scott's diaries - the "P. R. team", as Antarctic historian Matthew Alan McArthur describes them. Mrs Oates is no frail violet. Of all the expedition wives, she is the one with money, means, and questions: she read between lines, did not accept the narrative of heroic explorers dying for their country, and suspected bungling. She took her questions to Scott's wife.

Kathleen does not record the encounter. They did not speak again.

**In Other News**

Cherry returned to a quiet life in the country. He pusued friendships with interesting men and interesting women, avoiding marriage and children, although women liked Cherry. Birdie Bowers, who paid keen attention to the women he encounters, says that Cherry was "good with girls". His relationship with Ory Wilson was life-long, and he coresponded too with Caroline Oates. There were love affairs too, as he grew older, although little sign of a hoped-for proposal. Kathleen Scott, who had argued with Cherry by this point, reconciled, and cooled again, noted in her diary, "How amazing. How could anyone love Cherry - like that?" It's a comment perhaps explained by the fact that Chery did not like her - like that. She tells Cherry that his was one of the few opinions she really trusted - but then he writes _The Worst Journey in the World_. "He has criticised Con in the most appalling fashion," Kathleen wrote, incensed, for by the time Cherry, writing, rewriting, and trying to exorcise his own guilt, had finished his book, Scott had been deified in her memory as well as the nation's. "Rot," she writes in the margins of her copy, over and over again.

Cherry survived the criticism, publishing privately with Faber, beyond the reach of a publisher's need to survive public opinion. Time moved on: Cherry sold his estates and took up book collecting, although he was, in his biographer Sara Wheeler's apt coment, "Coping manfully with the rising tides of flapperdom." At 53, he did marry. His wife was then in no danger of loosing her husband to the ice, although Cherry would always love to travel by ship.

So many of the expedition women do quietly extraordinary things. Wilson's Ory never remarried: she was awarded the CBE for her voluntary work with the New Zealand Red Cross. In the 1920s, Cherry's sister Edith, considered delicate in her youth, climbs to the top of the Matterhorn. Emily Bowers and Edie Bowers purchase the first home they had ever owned, down the hill from Caerlaverock Castle, on the seashore at Ardbeg. They named it the House of the Sea. In 1914 Edie joind up, and sailed to the Dardanelles as a nursing sister. Her views on gender were as fierce as her brother's. "If men would only be men nowadays," she wrote, "Women would not need to clamour for the vote."

Kathleen was not quiet, although she too was no suffragette. "Women should just say what they want!" she insisted. Not every woman, though, welcomed the prime minister to her studio for afternoon tea. Katherine did. Her friendships were notorious. "It is nice to know there is a woman so like what one has dreamt of but never met," Freidrich Nansen - that Nansen - wrote to her. They met in London, and then in New York and Berlin. Katherine, always willing to be adored, noted, "I was going to remain a completely faithful wife, only I was not going readily to throw aside such a divine friendship." Affair or not, her sculpture alone is enough to make her famous: she is particularly well known for her statutes of children, and for her depiction of explorers. Her bronze Scott, in polar dress, is in London: the marble copy in Christchurch was damaged in the 2011 earthquake, and awaits repair.

Teddy Evans, who had so nearly derailed the expedition in Melbourne, survives the expedition. It is his wife Hilda ("a brick" says Birdie Bowers: Kathleen Scott does not agree) who dies, of suspected peritonitis, on their return journey to England.

Cherry continues to fret over the past. Her writes and re-writes notes on his book, prefixes, forwards, letters, considers and reconsiders his own role. Married to an enterprising woman, friends with many, in his last addendum Cherry writes, "There are many questions which ought to be studied. ... the question of women in these temperatures...?"

**Author's Note:**

> "...in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes."
> 
> Benjamin Franklin, in a letter to Jean-Baptiste Le Roy, 1789


End file.
